Page 41 of The F*cking Fabulous Forties Club

Still, I don’t want to annoy Niamh by badgering her even more, so I do the only thing I can really think of doing short of driving over to Niamh’s and breaking her front door in. I call Laura, in the hope that our recently repaired friendship triangle will mean she might at least know what’s going on.

‘Becca,’ she answers, her voice a little hoarse. ‘How are you? I’m feeling a little delicate. I think I went too gung-ho on the Prosecco at Sonas yesterday. My head is not thanking me for it. Doesn’t help that Aidan and I demolished the best part of a bottle of red when I got home.’

‘Poor you,’ I say. ‘Thankfully I’m not hungover but I was just out walking Daniel so I need to thaw out a bit. It’s bitter out there today. We’re not long in from a walk and we were both absolutely drenched. We met Conal in the park walking his wee dog.’

She sighs. ‘He can’t sit still at the moment. Has to keep busy. That poor dog has had the legs walked off him. Conal just doesn’t want too much time to think about things, you know? I’m heading over to Mum’s soon to help him go through some paperwork and start clearing the house. There’s nothing I’d rather do less,’ she says and I can hear the trepidation in her voice. I don’t blame her. It’s a horribly cruel job to hoke through the detritus of a life knowing that is all that is left behind.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s not easy. At least you have Conal to help. I’d have been lost without Ruairi, for all our fighting, when Dad died. I’m afraid I sort of fell to pieces a bit.’ The memories of that awful time come flooding back and I close my eyes tightly to push them away. No, I have enough to be worrying about without slipping back to the worst of times.

‘Conal has sort of fallen to pieces too,’ Laura says mournfully and I’m floored with guilt about not asking him how he is and focusing on Daniel instead. ‘I think we’ll both be as bad as each other,’ Laura continues. ‘I’d happily leave it all until after Christmas, but Conal is right – if we don’t do it now, we’ll just find it harder in the long run. It’s just knowing where to start. All her things…’

Her voice cracks and the people pleaser in me, which is also exceptionally similar to the part of me feeling a bit lost without my immediate mammying responsibilities, speaks up. ‘I can help you too, you know. I can come over if you want, and you don’t mind Daniel coming too. You’re not alone in this, Laura. That’s why you have me… and Niamh.’

There’s a pause and an intake of breath which is shaky, and then she sighs a ‘thank you’ and it’s hard to ignore the crack in her voice. ‘It would be brilliant if you could help. I don’t want to impose, but I feel so lost,’ she says.

‘It’s not an imposition,’ I tell her firmly, and I mean it. Niamh helped me after Dad died and I’d have been for the funny farm had she not kept me on my feet – and on my antidepressants.

My lovely Niamh.

Which reminds me, she’s the reason I’m calling Laura in the first place. ‘Tell me this,’ I say. ‘Have you heard anything from Niamh since yesterday? She’s been unusually quiet and I didn’t think she was quite herself after the massage.’

‘Well, she sent me a text last night just to check I was okay. Clearly she’d seen me self-medicating with whatever Prosecco I could get my hands on. I texted her back and said I was fine, if a little pished. I’ve not heard from her since, but I’ve not tried to get in touch with her either,’ Laura says.

‘And did you think she seemed a little out of sorts yesterday?’ I ask.

‘To be honest, I don’t think I’m the person to ask. It’s not like I’ve spent much time with her over the last ten years. I don’t know that I could speak to what’s usual for her any more. Are you worried?’ There’s a pause while I try and figure out what exactly it is I am feeling.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. ‘My spidey senses are tingling that something’s up but I’m not sure how to ask her. She’s normally so open with me.’

‘What do you think could be wrong?’ Laura asks, and I’m about to tell her about the lumpy boobs situation when it strikes me that she has only just lost her mother to breast cancer. Raising my, hopefully unfounded, fears with her would be insensitive at best, and downright distressing at worst.

‘I just don’t know,’ I lie. ‘But could you do me a favour and maybe just send her a little message. Just check in. And let me know if she replies to you. Maybe it’s my phone that’s on the blink or something.’

Yes, dear reader, there are straws in this room and here I am, grasping at them as if my life depends on it.

28

THE WAY WE WERE

Laura and I hug on the doorstep of the house that was like a second home to me during my teenage years. Of course, the intervening thirty years have seen lots of changes to the O’Hagan home. The walls are no longer rag-rolled and stencilled to death as was the style in the nineties. There isn’t the faint smell of Regal cigarettes in the air – which were Kitty’s poison of choice back in the day. She gave up smoking almost twenty-five years ago – which makes her death from cancer all the crueller to wrap my head around.

But even with the changes, I would know in a heartbeat this was the O’Hagan homestead. The same, if slightly dated and faded photos of Laura and Conal as children hang on the walls. Kitty loved a good family photo and she most certainly did not believe in hiding them away in albums or boxes. Her love for her two children was displayed, sometimes garishly, on her walls. It feels comforting now, somehow. Like it proves she lived and she created her own story and her own family – both of whom are now parents themselves and standing in front of me as fully grown adults, as Daniel and Lazlo eye each other suspiciously from either side of the room.

It really doesn’t feel like all that long ago that we were lounging in Kitty’s living room, listening to the radio and telling Conal it was ‘girls only’ and he wasn’t welcome. We made such a big deal of it, when the truth was that back then Conal didn’t want to spend time with us. He was usually just popping his head around the door to tell us to turn the music down, or ask if any of us were heading up to the shop and if so, could we bring him back a Crunchie. I’m pretty sure that in 1992 Conal O’Hagan survived on Crunchies and hot buttered toast and nothing else.

A hundred versions of him, along with a hundred versions of his little sister, smile down from the walls now – in the hall, the living room, and the kitchen. Dressed like mini-adults for special occasions, Conal in a full three-piece suit for his First Holy Communion while Laura had the best of everything for hers. She had a long dress, gloves and even an umbrella. It’s only when I got older that I realised how hard Kitty would’ve had to work to afford that on just one income – but she was a strong and fearless woman and she was determined no one would see her children as disadvantaged in any way by the absence of their father.

I spot a picture of both of them at the beach. At a guess I’d say Conal was maybe nine or ten in the photo, making Laura seven or eight. He’s standing proud on what was clearly a windy day – his dirty fair hair blowing in the breeze – wearing a pair of what can only be described as budgie smugglers. While Laura is in a lemon-yellow swimsuit with a white waistband. Both look absolutely frozen and yet are grinning widely at the camera and it hits me square in the feels. Behind that camera Kitty would have been smiling back at them, encouraging them to grin and making them laugh in the way she always did. They might be fully grown now, but that sense of joy was something Kitty instilled in them every day of their lives.

‘I think that particular picture can be safely stored in an album,’ Conal says, cringing. ‘The eighties really were interesting times for fashion.’

‘You telling me you don’t still have a pair of those to wear when you go to the pool?’ I grin.

‘Dear God, no!’ he says and there’s a pause where both of us know we could make some sort of flirty comment in the way adults do, but are also aware of who the other is and how this might not be particularly appropriate in the current situation.

‘Speaking of interesting times for fashion,’ Laura says, ‘look at this.’ She points to another framed photo on the wall in the kitchen and there we are – three tragically uncool teenagers with bad perms, jeans that came from Dunnes Stores when anyone with any true fashion sense was wearing Levis, and brightly coloured T-shirts. We had scrunchies in our hair and braces on our teeth and we look not dissimilar to street urchins. Laura, Niamh and I are sitting side by side on Laura’s bed – an open copy of Smash Hits in front of us. It is far from a remarkable photo – nothing more than a snap that if taken today would be instantly deleted but Kitty had put it in a frame and had hung it on her wall because I think she realised it isn’t the quality of the photo that really matters at the end of the day. It’s the people in it.

‘There are worse atrocities in the living room,’ Conal laughs. ‘You may live to regret slagging off my fancy swimming trunks.’

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